The boots ignored the sounds.
They moved on, ribbed rubber bottoms and laced high leather tops creating a
meandering wake in the ankle deep snow. From each side of the trail, drifted
snow leaned tiredly against the backsides of the bungalows, dropped there to
rest by an impatient blizzard just passed through. Their crests were
indistinguishable against the white stucco walls but nearly reached tufted
piles of fluffy snow clinging nervously to windowsills and eaves trough lips.

The squeaks flew through the
still night air, dodging fat flakes that fell heavy and straight onto my cap
bill, but occasionally splashing into my face flushed warm from the walk. I
could have rode back home from Christmas Eve Mass with the family, but the
teenage mind always prefers independence, and it was a chance to visit friends
along the way.

Faint strains of music joined
the squeaking as I approached our back fence. I stopped to hear the music more
clearly, now identifiable as singing voices escaping through an open window. I
shuffled forward and listened to the notes float out crisply and clearly, then
mingle with smoke rising from the chimneys. Notes and smoke rose together into an icy sky
illuminated by frost crystals set shimmering by thousands of stars and the
frosty moon the Ojibwe called Minidoo Geezis, the little spirit moon
that appears small and cold early in winter.

I held my breath to hear better
and determined that the music was “O Holy Night,” and the notes came from the
window in my grandmother’s room. It was open to the cold because most people
smoked cigarettes back then and at gatherings cracked a window to thin the
smoke. They sang the first verse, and, when they reached the sixth line, the
other voices ceased and one voice carried on alone:

“Fall on your knees! Oh, hear
the angel voices! O Niiii ... iiight Diii...vine! ...” That’s the part where
the notes rise higher and higher until the singer reaches an awesome note.

The solo voice belonged to my
grandmother, and I knew she was hitting that high note while sitting on the
edge of the bed that crippling rheumatoid arthritis had made her prison for
sixteen years. She was unable to walk without assistance and had trouble
holding a cigarette between her gnarled fingers.

The others had stopped singing
to listen to her. The second time she hit the high notes at the words “O Night
Divine,” a shiver danced on my spine.

When she finished singing “O Holy Night,” the other voices started up
again, this time with “Silent Night” and other favourite carols. I went into
the house and found Christmas Eve celebrants — my mom, dad, and some neighbours
— crowded into the ten-by-ten bedroom that was my grandmother’s world. They
sang long into the night, mostly in French because the neighbours were the
Gauthiers who seldom spoke English to my grandmother and my mother.

After the singing ended my
mother served tourtière, which I slathered with mustard. Then we gathered at
the tree and opened our gifts. I have long forgotten what I got, and it doesn’t
matter, because my real gift came many years later: the gift of realization
that those high notes were not solely the products of the lungs. They were
driven by something stronger than flesh — an unbreakable spirit. They came from
strength far beyond anything that a mere body can produce.

Sunday, December 21, 2014

Canada’s federal government continues to
pour millions of taxpayer dollars into one of its most notable successes:
blurring the line between journalism and propaganda.

Public
Works Canada is paying $1.25 million for a publicity outfit, which looks like a
real news operation, to write and distribute powder puff stories that “inform
and educate” Canadians. This is nothing new or unusual. Governments for decades
have used our taxes to buy distorted stories that make them look good.

Usually
government departments have staff publicity people to do this. Now there is a
trend to contract out flacking to private companies that try to look like
genuine news operations.

One
of those companies is News Canada Ltd., which is writing and distributing
“news” for Public Works Canada. The company name is part of the illusion that
this is a real news agency, which it is not.

The
company president, Shelley Middlebrook, aids the illusion by referencing her
company’s work to The Canadian Press (CP), a genuine news service that has been
providing professional journalism to print and broadcast media for 100 years.

Ms.
Middlebrook told Blacklock’s Reporter recently that News Canada gives media
outlets free stories, paid for and vetted by the federal government, bearing a
“News Canada” credit – “just like Canadian Press. . . . We follow Canadian
Press-style rules of writing, and articles have to be marked as ‘News Canada’
just like CP.”

I’m sure Ms. Middlebrook was
not trying to indicate that her company is the same type of professional
journalism agency as The Canadian Press. No doubt she was just trying to show that
her company follows high standards of writing style.

The government, however, wants
the public to think that its bought stories are balanced just like the real
journalism produced by real journalists working for real news operations like
The Canadian Press. Regrettably, the government is becoming successful at
blurring that line between propaganda and journalism because more and more
people no longer see the difference.

Here is the difference:

A recent government-paid-for “news story” on Aboriginal land claims extolls how “Canada has made a
commitment to reconciling relationships with First Nations people . . . . The
future looks bright. More win-win solutions are in the works to bring closure
and justice for all.”

At about the same time, the
Toronto Globe and Mail produced a major piece of journalism on the suicide of
Eddie Snowshoe in a federal prison. The story noted that the
suicide rate in federal prisons is seven times higher than in the public at
large. This was one of a number of news stories produced by real news
operations this year telling how federal government policies and practices are
harming, even killing, Canada’s native people.

Canadians are doing little to
stop the government from using their tax dollars to distribute information that
is not balanced and not completely accurate. The more we accept the use of
government propaganda, the more we lessen our democracy.

Tuesday, December 2, 2014

Ontario has a new plan to help it avoid bankruptcy. It is going to crack down on contraband cigarettes.

The folks who run the province have announced their hope to bring in an additional $700 million in taxes by going after the underground economy, which includes the huge untaxed cigarette trade. In some parts of the province almost 50 per cent of cigarettes smoked are contraband.

So the government plans to pour more money into enforcement to collect more taxes which will presumably help reduce the $12.5 billion budget deficit projected for fiscal 2014-15. Good luck with that, folks!

Governments have been fighting contraband, with poor success, since the first tax schemes were invented. Contraband trade develops when taxes are increased to the point that people can’t afford to pay them.

Governments and stop smoking groups insist that constantly upping tobacco taxes forces people to stop smoking. They are wrong and they refuse to accept their own statistics that show they are wrong.

Ontario has more layers of contraband tobacco enforcement than Mama Rosa’s Mile High Lasagna. It keeps adding to them, at more and more cost. Yet the only significant reduction in contraband tobacco in the last 25 years has been through cutting tobacco taxes.

In the early 1990s the contraband tobacco trade grew so large and so violent along the St. Lawrence River that the federal government and some provinces were forced to slash tobacco taxes. Ontario cut its cigarette excise tax by 67 per cent, Quebec by 71 per cent.

With those cuts, legal cigarette sales increased by 50 per cent. Seizures of untaxed cigarettes plunged by more than 90 per cent.

So how much did cutting taxes increase the smoking rate as predicted by politicians and anti-smoking groups?

In 1985, roughly 35 per cent of Canadians smoked. By the early 1990s when contraband flooded the country, only 30 per cent smoked. The smoking rate declined even more after the 1990s tax cut. In fact the decline was greater than in the years following 2002 when taxes were raised to previous levels and beyond.

Today, the smoking rate among Canadians is well below 20 per cent.

Ontario should not spend more tax dollars on police and revenue agents to stop addicted senior citizens driving away from a smoke shack with a carton of untaxed cigarettes. Higher taxes and more enforcement don’t significantly lower smoking rates. People kick the habit through education and programs designed to fight addiction.

Ontario is two-faced when it comes to cigarettes. It is addicted to tobacco taxation. No matter how much politicians talk about a Smoke-Free Ontario, they can’t live without cigarette taxes.

In 2011, Ontario took in $1.16 billion in tobacco taxes. The same year governments across Canada raked in $7.5 billion in tobacco taxation.

Slowly reducing tobacco taxes will help wean governments from their addiction and prepare them for the day when no one smokes and all that tobacco revenue is gone.